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Best Web Animations

Recently we have been discussing the use of web animations in modern website UIs, having covered such popular choices as storytelling animations, subtle motion, typography animations, data animations and others. It is hard to argue that the Web slowly but surely is becoming more vivid, impressive and expressive place that relies on visual impact.

Developers opt in favor of dynamic solutions rather than static ones; and it not only concerns animations but also gifs, walkthroughs, cinemagraph, and videos. The SVG, JS, CSS3, HTML5 and several other progressive languages and techniques have prepared a solid foundation for that, solving plenty of problems and providing an optimal environment for allowing your ideas to come true.

How To Create and Apply Web Animations

Last time we listed 10 different types of web animations that are a popular choice of developers nowadays. Today we are going to show you some simple and straightforward ways of how to reproduce one at home. Of course, our collection is not all-embracing, there are numerous other viable, complex and feature-rich solutions on the wild that can be as helpful and beneficial to you as we have collected. We just want to give you a small boost in this area.

Storytelling Animation/Guiding Animation

Rocket

Rocket is a lightweight JavaScript plugin that adds sprucing up to the moving between two positions of the object. You can assign it to any class you need. The list of effects includes 8 various transitions that you can experience on the official page.

Layzr.js

Layzr.js is an excellent solution for adding lazy animations that greatly enrich the general feeling of any website, especially those that feature a fully illustrated surrounding. Nevertheless, it also works with basic objects and components such as timeline charts or tables. Moreover, it does not overload the project.

Animatron

Animatron is a sophisticated platform that lets you build various types of HTML5 animations from tiny to complex ones. It is well-suited for charging banners and infographics with motion and giving zest to mobile-friendly UIs. What’s more, you do not have to delve into development, the service provides you with an intuitive editor where you can do all the magic.

Vivus

Vivus is intended to energize SVG objects, making a dramatic exit for them. It looks especially good in tandem with typography or line style illustrations or graphics. Its primary task is to smoothly draw the object. You can choose among a variety of animations and play with timing function in order to achieve impressive results.

Opening Animation

Animsition

Animsition enables you to prettify transitions between pages adding a flash-like touch to a website. The plugin offers an unbelievable amount of effects, including regular ones such as fade-in, fade-out or rotate, and unconventional ones such as flip or overlay.

AnimateTransition

AnimateTransition provides you with a list of basic animations that add to shifting between sections or pages a marvelous zest. The list embraces such effects as cover-in, cover-double-in, slide-in, slide-out, bounce-in and much more. Before selecting one, you can take a closer look at all of them.

Waiting Animation

Spin Kit

Spin Kit is a tiny plugin that features various flat nifty loading indicators. Each one is executed through CSS and can be a perfect finishing touch to your website. Although the solution works only in browsers that meet the latest standards of W3C, the author offers a simple fallback for IE9, and other outdated versions.

Loaders and Spinners

This is a huge collection of lightweight progress indicators powered by JavaScript and styled with CSS3 by Tim Holman. Here you will find abstract, type-based, minimalistic, standard and unconventional ones. Choose the most suitable for your project.

Particle Animation

Starscape Particle Animation

Starscape Particle Animation by Benedikt Wolters looks simply amazing. This fantastic effect is achieved with the help of JS, CSS3, and HTML. Moreover, the artist has created a massive control center that lets you customize an effect and adapt it to your needs.

CSS3 Random Particle Animation

CSS3 random particle animation By Jorge Epunan can be an excellent tool for prettifying backgrounds. It is delicate, subtle and fascinating without being overwhelming. Pairing up LESS and HTML, the developer has managed to achieve such results.

Walkthroughs

Precomposed Touch Gestures

Precomposed Touch Gestures by Aaron Wade includes a series of common gestures that are appropriate for creating fantastic walkthroughs for apps created for touch screen devices such as iPad or iPhone. They are QuickTime files that can be customized in any basic video editor or simply in Photoshop.

Radio Animation + Freebie

Radio Animation + Freebie by Pierre Bravoz includes an animation that represents a tiny interface for iWatch in action. It is an exquisite work with lots of tiny details that you can freely use for your purposes. It can be a perfect ground for building more complicated designs.

Mouse Animation

jQuery Stars Cursor Animation

jQuery Stars cursor animation leaves a fantastic trace of subtle stars while the mouse is moving around the screen. It is a sterling jQuery-driven plugin that can be implemented into any website design right away. Moreover, you can always change stars to any other object just by updating the image folder.

jQuery Awesome Cursor

jQuery Awesome Cursor enables you to change the standard shape of the cursor into any form presented in FontAwesome. It can be a question mark or a magic wand. However, if you do not find a perfect match in this font family, you can always use the other one. As expected, the solution works only in Chrome and Firefox.

Type Animation

Blast.js

Blast.js provides you with a more freedom when it comes to manipulating and treating lettering. It allows adding animations, styling characters like never before, searching and analyzing the set more efficiently.

Lettering.js

Lettering.js is a small yet powerful plugin that offers you full control over symbols. It is an ideal way for making headlines or titles look more distinctive and eye-catching. You can add special CSS effects and dynamics.

Data Animation

Chartist.js

Chartist.js is going to improve data presentation or infographic design with the help of CSS3 and JS, making standard graphs look attention-grabbing, interesting and stylish. The plugin covers various sorts of charts and graphs that are responsive, highly customizable, flexible and vibrant.

jQuery Chart Plugins

jQuery Chart plugins lets you create simple bar or line charts and pie charts that smoothly adapt to various browser screens and give statistics a more appealing look. Each one is animated to enrich the overall presentation.

Subtle Motion

Dynamics.js

Dynamics.js is all about physics-based animations. Using a small control panel you can recreate the necessary effect for any desired object. It allows animating transition between two points, states or positions, making it look alive and attention-grabbing. The effect can come in handy not only in lavish projects that are based on illustrative approaches but also in simple and plain ones where important items such as CTA buttons need more focus.

Iconate

Although Iconate is created specifically to work with icons, it is a powerful instrument that makes a transformation between two icons an impressive event that holds the whole attention. Just choose the starting and final object and type of transformation, the rest will be done by the plugin.

Conclusion

Nowadays creating animation or spicing up the UI with some subtle motion or eye-catching effect does not require special skills or a bulk of the experience. Just with a little help from the JS plugins that we have listed above, you can easily come up with something interesting and impressive that gives a page, object or the whole project a dramatic and expressive feel.

What kind of instruments do you use for such tasks? Share with us your experience and solutions.